What does it take to look at our surroundings with different eyes? Surrounded by natural elements, non-human creatures and a multiplicity of intertwined entities, Caroline David employs fantasy as a medium to instigate a deep reflection on how humans communicate and coexist with other species and the planet itself. Caroline’s world is populated by fantastic flora and undetermined beings that, as signals, call us to acknowledge nature’s significance and the irreducible meaning of all life and non-life on Earth. The blissful balance that characterizes her imaginary actually holds a powerful demand; it asks us to recognize ourselves in the non-human, and see how much of it we profoundly share. At a time when embracing radically non-anthropocentric views seems an increasingly necessary shift, Caroline unfolds a uniquely sensible vision, and invites us to love and care for what is other.

There’s a sense of tranquillity, honesty and lightheartedness to your work, as well as a definite coherence. How has your practice evolved to convey this?

Slowly, and with a lot of patience. And with increasing intention in the last year or so. I come to this work seeking those things for myself, and often with some hope of sharing those feelings with others.

The shapes and figures you present seem unadulterated, as if they came from another world, a place where peace and balance reign. What are your thoughts when you create?

I think a lot about harmony, symbiosis, love, peaceful and productive cohabitation, the role non-humans have in the world and in our lives, and how humans choose to honor and respect their surroundings (or not), whether that be element, nonhuman, plant, and so on. I also think quite a bit about what it takes to gain and change perspective, and if the planet and its non-human inhabitants would be better off if humans could just acknowledge how entangled our fates are with the overall health and wellbeing of the Earth.

Recently I’ve been very excited about finding ways to depict multiple entities at once. I feel strongly about the power of that to communicate that we are all indeed connected, related, and exist within and on top of each other, and that that’s all the more reason why we need to be taking care of one another. My hope is that keeping these ideas in the front of our minds will positively influence our actions and the way we treat our surroundings.

Most of your subjects are detached from the human form, and even the few subtly anthropomorphic characters are rendered as creatures with features that are just softly recognizable. Can you speak about your relationship to the non-human, nature, and fantasy?

I’ve been really surprised, while making this body of work, by how little information can be present for something to begin to read as anthropomorphic. It’s amazing to me how ready the human mind is to see the human form.
When I began making the flower work, I wasn’t exactly planning on exploring this overlap, where entities meet in form. I was thinking a lot about preservation, re-creation, celebrating seemingly “small” life, and what it might be like to look back on the planet in a hundred or a thousand years. But formal parallels between human and non-human began to appear, and to a degree that I couldn’t ignore. At first I think a lot of it was due to the construction of the work, which depicted life in ways that maybe we normally wouldn’t see, like a flower standing upright on its own versus attached to a stem. It’s pretty exciting to have your work bring something to your attention that you didn’t expect. Part of my work now explores this idea of nature relatedness, or how we as human beings understand our connection with nature, and subsequently nature’s presence and significance in everything. I would like to think that seeing ourselves in the non-human (and the non-human in ourselves) gives us a greater ability to care for and be sensitive to the needs of our surroundings and the Earth, and to appreciate just how much comes into and supports our lives through these channels.

Fantasy is an extremely urgent form of storytelling. So much of what is going on presently has been predicted by any number of “fantasies” years or decades ago. That’s because what we know as fantasy is always based in the truth, as it’s just another way of looking at ourselves. Many have been marveling lately at the accuracy of Octavia Butler’s Parable duology, written in 1993, for presciently describing the state of resource depletion, wealth inequality, and a wildly detestable president in the years following 2020. Another, maybe more frequently made comparison can be seen between our current climate and pandemic crisis and the tale of the Dwarves of Khazad-dûm and a Balrog in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring (1954). Or between humans and the planet of Athshe and the Athsheans in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest (1972). While the setting and characters portrayed in many of these countless tales would be considered fantasy, the idea of a species exploiting natural resources and paying the price for doing so, for example, is clearly not. Humans have been and continue to do that on multiple levels right now, and look where it’s landed us. So it is paramount that we continue to heed what transpires in the realm of fantasy.

I see my relationship to fantasy in my work in much of the same way. It’s an extremely important tool for self-reflection, whether that be on the individual or the global scale. Right now, it's a place that allows me to ask myself: How do I want things to be? Or think they should be? How do I think they could be better? What has to happen for these things to pass? Will we take new shape? What should be at the front of our minds as we move through the world? What is all of this going to look like in two hundred years?

I think there’s a certain relief that arises when one leaves human-centered narratives or figurations. Sometimes an encounter with beings other than human or with natural environments is enough to provide a sense of safety and belonging. I believe such experiences can shift the perception of our importance by reminding us of our smallness, amplifying the scope of our gaze to a planetary scale.
I feel something similar when I look at your work – I’d like to hear your perspective on being in the world.

Absolutely. We’re not the most important forms of life to ever exist. We’re lucky to live on Earth, and we as humans rely so heavily on its resources to support and fulfill all aspects of our lives. That means we have the utmost responsibility to take care of them, not only for ourselves, but also for everything else that we live here with.